AI is a paradox. For example, an AI chatbot, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or other tool are designed to give you answers.. That’s a benefit for sure but it also has been shown to reduce cognitive load on your brain. Cognitive load is the effort your brain exerts when thinking. With AI it’s easy to ask the question, get the answer and move on. In this scenario your brain has not had to ‘work’ and you haven’t really learned anything. Over time, as you rely more and more on AI you stop learning. Your brain needs to work, it needs to learn and relying too much on AI negatively affects your ability to think and learn. As the saying goes, ‘use it or lose it’.

So what is cognitive load? Cognitive load is your brain working. Your total cognitive load consists of two main components; extraneous load and germane load. Extraneous load is all of the less complicated but important activities of daily work. This could be organizing emails or files, arranging meetings, manipulating and dealing with data and so on. These are things your brain needs to devote time to but they are not normally cases that require a lot of active thought. Germaine load is a productive mental effort where you are actually learning. Where you actually have to focus and concentrate.

Cognitive load is a zero sum game. Your brain can only deal with so much and so the more extraneous load you’re dealing with the less Germaine load you can take on. This is where we can look at AI with a new lens. Ideally, we should use AI for extraneous load and not for Germane load. However, AI can be extremely helpful for germane load, if we use it properly.

It’s easy to use AI when it comes to germane load but we need to be careful not to outsource our thinking. For example, when it comes to creating a new document or writing some code, it is easy to tell your AI system to just do it for you. The problem is that, when you are done, you have not learned anything and you may not even understand the output. To use AI effectively and to maintain your ability to think, here are some tips on how to do this:

  1. The first thing is to maintain your autonomy. Think of AI as a helper to your thinking and not the thing doing the thinking. The ideas and planning should be yours. AI can help fill in details but it shouldn’t be the originator.
  2. Think through the problem yourself first. Come up with your own ideas and approach to the problem. You can use AI later to flesh things out and look for errors.
  3. Don’t just accept the solution. Look at it as an educational example. Analyze the responses. Does it look correct? Remember, AI can hallucinate.
  4. Use AI conversationally, not as an answer engine. Use it to brainstorm, ask it for opinions or to point out flaws in your thinking.
  5. Use it to format ideas, clean up data. Let it remove friction from your tasks.
  6. Use AI to help build your own competence. Use it as a teacher. One approach I have found to be very helpful is to tell it to use the Socratic Method by asking you questions. This makes your brain think about the topic rather than passively accepting the responses.
  7. After using AI to teach you something, try to apply it on your own without AI. You can use AI to help you fill in the parts you missed. Then keep trying until you can fill the gaps yourself.

This is not an exhaustive list but should help get you going. Don’t passively accept answers from AI, think about it, critique it. Use it as a sounding board. Let it handle the rote work while you focus on tasks that only a human should do such as applying judgement and providing wider context.